though you’re not the cheerleader or even close to the prettiest girl in the school. A guy who thinks you’re beautiful, just the way you are.
“My parents are in Boston,” he says. “Want to go to my house?”
“Sure.” I figure I’d go just about anywhere with him.
I have this theory that you can tell everything about a person by their room, but in Sebastian’s case, it isn’t true. His room is more like a guestroom in an antique boardinghouse than an actual boy’s lair. There’s a black and red handmade quilt, and an old wooden captain’s wheel hangs on the wall. No posters, photographs, albums, baseballs—not even a dirty sock. I stare out the window at the view of a fading brown field and past that, the stark yellow brick of a convalescent home. I close my eyes and try to pretend I’m with Sebastian in the Max Ernst painting under an azure blue sky.
Now that I’m actually in his room—with him, for real—I’m a little uneasy.
Sebastian takes my hand and leads me to the bed. He puts his hands on either side of my face and kisses me.
I can barely breathe. Me—and Sebastian Kydd. It’s really happening.
After a while, he raises his head and looks at me. He’s so close I can see the tiny flecks of dark green around his irises. He’s so close I could count them if I tried.
“Hey,” he says. “You never asked why I didn’t call.”
“Was I supposed to?”
“Most girls would have.”
“Maybe I’m not most girls.”This sounds kind of arrogant but I’m certainly not going to tell him how I spent the last two weeks in an emotional panic, jumping every time the phone rang, giving him sidelong glances in class, promising myself I would never, ever do any bad thing ever again if he would only talk to me the way he had that night at the barn…and then hating myself for being so stupid and girlish about the whole thing.
“Did you think about me?” he asks slyly.
Oh boy. A trick question. If I say no, he’ll be insulted. If I say yes, I’ll sound pathetic.
“Maybe a little.”
“I thought about you.”
“Then why didn’t you call?” I ask playfully.
“I was afraid.”
“Of me?” I laugh, but he seems oddly sincere.
“I was worried that I could fall in love with you. And I don’t want to be in love with anyone right now.”
“Oh.” My heart drops to my stomach.
“Well?” he asks, running his finger along my jaw.
Aha. I smile. It’s only another one of his trick questions.
“Maybe you just haven’t met the right girl,” I murmur.
He brings his lips close to my ear. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
My parents met in a library.
After college, my mother was a librarian. My father came in to borrow some books, saw my mother, and fell in love.
They were married six months later.
Everyone says my mother used to look like Elizabeth Taylor, but in those days they told every pretty girl she looked like Elizabeth Taylor. Nevertheless, I always picture Elizabeth Taylor sitting demurely behind an oak desk. My father, bespectacled and lanky, his blond hair modeled into a stiff crew cut, approaches the desk as my mother/Elizabeth Taylor stands up to help him. She is wearing a poodle skirt flourished with fuzzy pink pom-poms.
The skirt is somewhere up in the attic, zipped away in a garment bag with the rest of my mother’s old clothes, including her wedding gown, saddle shoes, ballet slippers, and the megaphone embossed with her name, Mimi, from her days as a high-school cheerleader.
I almost never saw my mother when she wasn’t beautifully dressed and had completed her hair and makeup. For a period, she sewed her own clothes and many of ours. She prepared entire meals from the Julia Child cookbook. She decorated the house with local antiques, had the prettiest gardens and Christmas tree, and still surprised us with elaborate Easter baskets well past the time when we had ceased to believe in the Easter Bunny.
My mother was just like all the other mothers, but a little better, because she felt that presenting one’s home and family in the best possible light was a worthy pursuit, and she made everything look easy.
And even though she wore White Shoulders perfume and thought jeans were for farmers, she also assumed that women should embrace this wonderful way of being called feminism.
The summer before I started second grade, my mother and her friends started reading The Consensus, by Mary Gordon Howard. It was a heavy novel, lugged to and from the club in large canvas bags filled with towels and suntan lotion and potions for insect bites. Every morning, as they settled into their chaises around the pool, one woman after another would pull The Consensus out of her bag. The cover is still etched in my brain: a blue sea with an abandoned sailboat, surrounded by the black-and-white college photographs of eight young women. On the back was a photograph of Mary Gordon Howard herself, taken in profile, a patrician woman who, to my young mind, resembled George Washington wearing a tweed suit and pearls.
“Did you get to the part about the pessary?” one lady would whisper to another.
“Shhhh. Not yet. Don’t give it away.”
“Mom, what’s a pessary?” I asked.
“It’s not something you need to worry about as a child.”
“Will I need to worry about it as an adult?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. There might be new methods by then.”
I spent the whole summer trying to find out what it was about that book that so managed to hold the attention of the ladies at the club that Mrs. Dewittle didn’t even notice when her son David fell off the diving board and needed ten stitches in his head.
“Mom!” I said later, trying to get her attention.“Why does Mary Gordon Howard have two last names?”
My mother put down the book, holding her place with her finger. “Gordon is her mother’s maiden name and Howard is her father’s last name.”
I considered this. “What happens if she gets married?”
My mother seemed pleased by the question. “She is married. She’s been married three times.”
I thought it must be the most glamorous thing in the world to be married three times. Back then, I didn’t know one adult who had been divorced even once.
“But
